467 - 1st Art & Design Week “Carpe-Diem” in February at the Girne American University3/6/2013

By Heidi Trautmann

Once a year it is important and welcome to stand up and make a sort of recapitulation of what one has been done, what was the goal and what has been achieved and what can be done in the future. This was the basic idea of two teachers of the Faculty of Architecture, Design & Fine Arts Department of Graphic Design & Fıne Arts Painting, Sibel Kemal Uzun, Head of Graphic Design Department, and from the Painting Dept. Lecturer Sinem Ertaner. During this week in February they established a programme to present and have discussed matters of interest and along with it went exhibitions of the departments; seminars; workshop and presentations; guest lecturers were invited to speak about various aspects of the arts.

In the exhibition, open over the entire week in the interesting Techno Park Exhibition Area, I found a cross section through the various departments’ activities such as ceramic sculpting, painting, graphic design for advertising measures, printing such as lino cut and exlibris art. While I was there many students from other faculties came to inform themselves about the work of the arts departments. On another day a printing workshop was offered to students by Ipek Denizli Karagöz; it was mainly an introduction into lino cut procedures and some cutting techniques were shown.

On the same day was a presentation by Özgül Ezgin, photographer, on the development of photography during the last century, showing the impact photography has on the arts, explaining the various techniques and today’s state of the art. It was about the "liberation stages of photography" as Özgül put it. She went through a historical analysis of photography and named 4 milestones: 1. the discovery of the Brownie camera (1900's) 2. the invention of digital camera (1975); 3) the integration of camera into mobile phones (1995) and 4. the invention of smart phones (1990s - 2013 ). A further point of the programme was a visit wasto the Studio of artist Osman Keten in the Arabahmet area and also to the new venue ESKI with the current exhibition of Umay Yilmaz.

On the last day Zehra Sonya, President of EMAA – European Mediterranean Art Association, spoke about sculpting from the beginning of times till today with our conceptual understanding. In a slide and video show Zehra brought examples to illustrate her lecture and to explain the basics of contemporary art and how to make analyses. An interesting event and, as the organisers expressed, they will repeat it every year as a recapitulation of the work done.

Ahhh, why don’t we do just that in other fields of public activities, it could be very helpful.